Warning over lack of female engineers: “Semta, the sector skills council for science, engineering and advanced manufacturing, has urged industrialists to close the gender gap by getting more women into industry.”

I’m bored of hearing about your wife | the border house: “Almost every time I go to a tech- or gaming-related conference, I hear middle-aged white men in suits talk about their wives and children. This would be lovely and rather sweet, were it not for the fact that they all seem to be married to the same woman, and they all seem to be raising the same children.”

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Engendering Change | Atomic MPC: “Katie Williams looks at how gamers and game developers are tackling sexism, and how some of us are just making things worse…”

Meaningful Adventure | Share Your Story: A game design project that “seeks to raise awareness of the positive and negative treatment women face in the gaming community by building a digital game. We are seeking help from both men and women to get a better grasp on what real women experience while playing games.” Looking for you to share your stories. “Within one or two weeks, the anonymized, edited collection will be posted on the project website at meaningfuladventure.wordpress.com.”

Gender and Swag | MISinformation: “Each year when the Grace Hopper Conference happens, there is the inevitable discussion about the swag (the freebies in registration packets) given out. I have to confess that the first year I heard that companies gave out nail polish and “girlie” things, I was totally offended, but that was before I attended Grace Hopper. After attending, my whole attitude changed. Engaging in this year’s debate made me stop and think a bit more about the phenomenon.”

The point of calling out bad behavior. | Adventures in Ethics and Science: “And, I’ll level with you: while, in an ideal world, one would want the perpetrator of sexist behavior to Learn and Grow and Repent and make Sincere Apologies, I don’t especially care if someone is still sexist in his heart as long as his behavior changes. It’s the interactions with other people that make the climate that other people have to deal with. Once that part is fixed, we can talk strategy for saving souls.”

Two GF related projects with Kickstarters:

Articulate: “Articulate aims to raise the profile of women speakers in the technology and the creative industries by offering public speaking training, developing partnerships with event programmers, and giving better access to talented female speakers.” (Kickstarter coming later in October)

Mothership HackerMoms | Projects. Friends. Inspiration. With Childcare.: “We are a new kind of playground and workspace for creative mothers. Fun to us is not mani-pedis at the mall, but making, breaking, learning and hacking our bright ideas. These creations are our children, too, and deserve a chance at life. Our mission is to give mothers the time and space to explore DIY craft and design, hacker/maker culture, entrepreneurship, and all manner of creative expression – with childcare.”

Two GF related Tumblrs:

Academic Men Explain Things to Me | Tumblr: “Are you a female academic, researcher, or graduate student? Has a man tried to explain your field or topic to you, on the assumption that he must inevitably know more about it than you do? Share your experiences as a mansplainee here.”

Gender and Science: Gender and Science Tumblr: photos of and quotes from female scientists.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Scientists, Your Gender Bias Is Showing: “To test scientist’s reactions to men and women with precisely equal qualifications, the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name. Results: female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, hireability, and mentoring (whether the scientist would be willing to mentor this student). Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower.”

Beating the Odds – How We got 25% Women Speakers for JSConf EU 2012: “We received 234 total talk submissions by 180 unique submitters. 162 (90%) men, 18 (10%) women. We invited 35 women to submit to the CFP, of these 13 ended up submitting one or more proposals, 5 women submitted on their own. The 40 speakers we selected for the weekend are the top 40 anonymously ranked of all proposals.The final tally:

40 speaking slots (100%)

30 men speaking (75%)

10 women speaking (25%)”

World Con and accessibility (or lack thereof) | sasha_feather: “Karen Moore recently went to WorldCon and was struck by the difference in the lack of accessibility there vs. at WisCon. She wrote us a letter to say so, and gave me permission to quote her letter in my blog. Excerpts from her letter follow”

Things To Do When The Internet Makes You Enraged | Skepchick: “I’ve been struggling recently, trying to find the best way to handle the ongoing barrage of anger and hate that has been directed at various people in the [feminist/atheist/skeptic] community….So I thought I’d put together some things that you and others can do to make a difference in this community to build it up and strengthen the foundations”

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

The majority of commenters agreed that women could not excel in math, due to biology and evolution. In Slashdot Science, the commenters were mostly grown men with science degrees. I was a nineteen-year-old girl with only a high school diploma and a love of science. They were more educated than me, and I wanted to learn from them.

Whenever I encountered a Slashdot article about science and gender, I read the comments, trying to learn more about myself. I felt sick to my stomach each time. I used mental gymnastics to reconcile my love of science with science-credentialed, male elders proclaiming with certainty that female brains were unfit for math and science. They were the experts, after all. I was only a young, female science student.

Math and science are hard. I worried that when I found something challenging in math or science, it was because I was a girl and lacked the mental machinery to understand it. (I thought of myself as a “girl”, because I was still technically a teenager.) I accepted evolution. Many times, I had panick attacks over the possibility that I had innate, hard-wired mental limitations. Before graduating with a science degree, I was unproven. There was no proof that I could be a science person, but I already saw mountains of scientific evidence suggesting that I could not be a science person. Unproven male geeks don’t struggle with science research telling them that they can’t do science when they start to try.

Only after I graduated with a science degree did I feel I had the authority to challenge Slashdotters. Only after I graduated did I feel like a real adult. After I graduated, I was livid, knowing that Slashdot commenters were merely conjecturing casually about my mental limitations, unwittingly crushing the self-esteem of my younger geek self.

Sexism on the Internet—especially discussion websites about science, computers, and math—are like guided missiles targeting and damaging the self-esteem of young female geeks. Female geeks are most likely to see male geeks discuss our alleged mental inferiority in math and science. Non-geek women are unlikely to see these comments, because they are not the ones reading Slashdot, Digg, reddit, Hacker News, techcrunch, or Ars Technica.

For many male geeks, conjecturing about women’s mental and career potential is just an intellectual exercise, and stating personal and scientific hypotheses about women as if they are scientific facts is harmless. For us, it is personal and disturbing.

I’m a English-major Geek. You probably knew a dozen or two like me in college. You want conversations on Shakespeare, grammar, early science fiction, or a Fruedian analysis of The Hobbit, I’m your woman. I’m not science or math-phobic, I’m really not. But for the past twenty years, I’ve been getting most of my science from NOVA, science fiction novels, and pizza-and-beer lectures from friends. (I get my math from Vi Hart videos.)

My spouse is similarly situated.

Now, we have a precocious daughter who is exceptionally science-y. Has been since she became fascinated with early hominid evolution when she was three. She once interpreted a Science Museum docent to explain, patiently, that the skeleton he was showing was Homo ergaster, not a Neanderthal. In fact, it was Turkana Boy. She was four and she was right. (He’d grabbed the wrong photo.)

I’ve been scrambling ever since I figured out that I’ve likely got a scientist on my hands. Turns out that Women in Science is THING! (I knew that before but it wasn’t really immediately relevant to my life until that moment.) So I’ve done what I can: she watches NOVA and ViHart with me, I read the Scientific America blog, we practically live at the local Science Museum and Natural History Museums. I try to explain the science of what I’m doing at any moment, as well as I understand it.

I even discovered that most of the scientists doing studies in pediatric brain development are women. So I’ve signed her up for every “brain study” in the city so she can see female scientists at work. (At age 6, she’s had about a dozen MRIs.)

But I feel like, as an English Major Geek, I should be doing something more. Or different. Thoughts? Suggestions? Resources?

Using real footage and sounds from a working science lab, the Inside Knowledge team have reconstructed the White Stripes song Seven Nation Army from scratch. Here’s the video:

This is an open thread, for general discussion of any topic as long as you adhere to our commenting policy. Feel free to suggest links, ask questions, share videos, comment on older stories whose individual comment threads are closed, or anything else that tickles your fancy.

This Can’t Be Real: “Slavery The Game”: A website has sprung up for a supposed new gaming developer called Javelin Reds Gaming. Their first title is the light-hearted (sarcasm) and family-friendly (dripping sarcasm) game entitled Slavery the Game.

In Job Market, Social Contacts Help Men – Not Women: men who had lots of specialized work experience were often recruited into a new job through their social contacts without having to look for a job. In fact, men with this kind of experience were 12 percent more likely to find a new job through informal recruitment than they were through a formal job search… Women, however, did not see this benefit.

I, Singularity…: Elizabeth Bear discusses and critiques (partly from a feminist perspective) the pressure for science fiction authors to address the technological singularity/transhumanism/post-body, and the problems with having an idea of required subject matter for real science fiction at all.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

While the discussions about pseudonym use on Google+ continues on, there’s a different front that opened up in mid-August: Science Blogs, which is the home of a huge number of top science blogs, has decided to end psuedonymnous blogging.

I have just been informed that ScienceBlogs will no longer be hosting anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers. In case you are interested, despite extensive communication from many of us as to why we blog under pseudonyms, I have not been given any rationale or reason for this move. Particularly, no rationale or reason that responds to the many valid points raised by the pseudonymous folks.

You are a student whose advisor will equate your blogging with time not spent doing research… You are trying to get a promotion/tenure and you have no idea how the committees that will be deciding whether to promote/tenure you view blogging… Blogging about what you blog about under your own name might significantly reduce your safety. (This might include doing research with animals, providing reproductive health care services…)

Maggie Koerth-Baker has a great piece at Boing Boing about the difference between being a professional writer and a scientistÂ¸ which also has links to a lot of discussion in and near the Science Blogs community:

I know who DrugMonkey is [in the sense of knowing his pseudonymous persona] and I know that he has to be as responsible for everything he writes under that name as I am responsible for what I write as Maggie Koerth-Baker. The difference is that writing is my profession. It’s not his. Instead, he has to balance the needs of a profession in laboratory science with the needs of a writing hobby.

Nurture affects gender differences in spatial abilities. In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society. (Mainstream audience summary at Ars Technica.)

(Warning: screenshots of video game violence.) “Did she just money-shot herself with his neck-blood?”: And in a patriarchal society where masculine = good, strong and feminine = bad, weak these women (made by dudes for dudes) exist as tokens of counterfeit empowerment because they enact male fantasies of power. This is why the femme fatale, despite having no narrative agency, is sold as a strong character.

The Luxury of “Reasonable”: But there’s a reason [Brandon] Sanderson can be so reasonable [about his faith-based anti-homosexuality beliefs]… He’s not being told he can’t bring his boyfriend to his own prom. Agents/editors aren’t rejecting his work because he wrote about LGBT characters. He’s not being denied basic rights…

Different takes on rape and negative portrayals of women in George R.R. Martin’s fiction (meta discussion, some satirical, not graphic):

Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece: Alyssa Rosenberg criticises Sady Doyle’s take, in particular that she reads it as coming close to stating that no artistic depiction of sexual violence is acceptable, and that the anti-geek tone is harmful. Now, sexism is more entrenched and more broadly impactful than disdain for nerds. But that doesn’t actually mean that these kinds of statements are useful or clever when they’re deployed by feminists against nerds…

So seriously, why aren’t there more women in science?: Yes, the perennial question, but there are some brief interviews with some leading women scientists: Cathy Foley, CSIRO division chief; Suzanne Cory, Australian Academy of Science President; Mahananda Dasgupta professor in ANU Department of Nuclear Physics and others.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).